Sunday, January 18, 2009

Last week, the National Endowment for the Arts released its new report, Reading on the rise: A new chapter in American literacy. Unlike its most recent previous efforts, this one, as the title suggests, is not a gloom-and-doomer about how American youth is going to hell in a handbasket. In fact, their new report is more consistent with comments I've made in this space than with their own earlier reports.

For the past 25 years, NEA has periodically surveyed American adults to find out about their literary reading habits (literary referring to fiction, poetry, drama, and the like). In 2002, they indicated that there were nearly 7.5 percent fewer adults reading literature than in any past survey and it wouldn't be too much to say that the NEA thought that signaled the end of Western civilization as we know it.

Some observers, me included, pointed out that such a big drop in such a short period was puzzling and improbable, and that perhaps people were reading just as much, just not fiction.

I know in my own personal life, I mix my reading up pretty good. I just read several novels in a row, so to keep fresh, I have started in on Francis Parkman's Montcalm and Wolfe, a history (albeit with a somewhat literary bent in its styling).

The new NEA census indicates that since 2002 the readership of literature has climbed by 3.5% and that more American adults read literature than at any time since they started their studies.

Not surprisingly, NEA couldn't pin this great success on anything. It is totally unclear what might have changed these habits so quickly and what it means (except maybe that Western civilization has been saved after all).

I think the biggest problem in this discussion is the conflating of literacy with literary reading. The NEA has chosen to use its past reports to expound on the idea that young people are lost because they aren't partaking in literary pursuits and that this means they can't read and can't think as well as their predecessors.

Not to put too fine a point on it, that is bunk!

Young people are increasingly doing their reading in electronic forms and using their reading for purposes other than literary. That neither means that they have stopped reading nor stopped thinking.

Here's a new hypothesis on what happened in 2002: America was wracked by the terrorism that hit near the end of 2001, and we plunged into a very difficult war (while debating entering another potentially devastating war in Iraq). Those terrible public events increased interest in understanding terrorism, Middle Eastern politics, war, public events, and religion (Koran sales rose, for instance). Yes, readers could have turned to literature to explore their feelings of anger and impotence, rage and retaliation. Instead, maybe what they did was turned to reading to feed their more rational impulses. Maybe we weren't as concerned about how we felt about things as about what we needed to know to take appropriate action.

The NEA survey treats the reading of history, world culture, public affairs, religion, and current events as being non-literary, and by implication of their argument, non-literate. The literacy that we need must be broader than that, however: our reading ability needs to allow us to make sense of a chemistry text, a Time magazine article, a biography of Osama Bin Laden, the manifesto from the Unibomber, or the President's most recent speech... not just Vanity Fair, The Pickwick Papers, or even The Kite Runner.

Fiction and poetry do fulfill very real human needs, but most adults do not seek to fulfill those particular needs 24/7. Other reading experiences can enable other worthwhile human pursuits. And, sometimes reading isn't even the best place to turn (surveys suggest people sought more family time, for instance, after 9/11--maybe that, too, is where some of the literary reading was shed temporarily).

The implication of NEA's previous reports is that schools must do more to encourage literary reading. The swings in amount of literary reading from period to period, suggest that the type of reading one engages in is due more to contemporary needs than education. People use reading to fulfill their needs. Schools should redouble their efforts to increase the depth and quality of the reading that its students can engage in, and expose students to a wide range of texts and uses of reading. That way, whether the individual is trying to improve their sexual prowess (The Joy of Sex), enhance their ability to be a citizen (Dreams of My Father), or trying to find out how to cope emotionally with the death of a spouse (The Sea), they will have a book (or a website) to turn to.

Thursday, October 9, 2008

The federal government invests a whole lot more in “kid literacy” than in teen literacy (we invest nearly $20 billion per year on Head Start, Reading First, and Title I reading programs, and about $30 million on Striving Readers). The same pattern is true in the states as well, and if you look at school standards, accountability monitoring, and the professional development of teachers, you see a definite tilt towards younger kids when it comes to reading.

It’s not just the inputs that differ either. National Assessment data show that kids are improving more in reading early on than the upper grades. The pattern is slow growth versus early on followed by stagnation. Our young kids do well in international comparisons, while our older kids get creamed.

Part of the problem is that the idea that learning to read is something accomplished by the time kids are in third grade. That reading development can extend through a lifetime is not widely recognized. Older kids could do better, if we are willing to teach them longer than we have traditionally. We need more explicit learning standards for older students, better preparation for their teachers, curricula, instructional materials, and programs for those who fall behind if we are going to get kids to higher levels of achievement.

The problem isn’t entirely due to official neglect and lack of funding. Another problem is that the field has been distracted; those who should be figuring out how to most effectively extend instruction up the grades have been exploring youth culture instead.

The theory is that youth now confronts many literacies in their daily lives, that these literacies are cognitively demanding, and multimodal (including reading film, television, Gangsta Rap, web pages, and other non-reading literacy). It is often claimed that these literacies are cognitively more demanding than the ones taught in school. So if kids are learning and using these challenging literacies on their own, why so much trouble advancing academically in school? This problem is attributed to the cultural mismatch between school literacy and the literacy of youth culture that has alienated kids from the mainstream. In other words, kids come to value the literacy they have learned on their own because it buys them entrée into the real world, and so they reject and refuse to learn the literacy of school. Some scholars want to celebrate these new literacies (go video games), while others hope to turn these insights into teaching nostrums: such as the idea that we should teach popular culture; the more we focus on Hip Hop the better the kids will recognized the relevance of school literacy.

There are some problems with these theories, though I certainly think it is a good idea to monitor the use of literacy in society, including within youth culture. One basic flaw is the claim that the skills students use when playing video grams are commensurate with those evident in reading. We don’t have good measures of cognitive equivalence across tasks, so there just isn’t convincing support for the idea that understanding the conflict in a video war is equal to understanding the conflicts in novel like, The Scarlet Letter.Even more flawed is the idea of the prevalence of these new literacy practices among youth. The researchers seem to be trying to “prove” that such literacy practices are widespread through case study examples. But looks at normative practices of IM-ing and the like do not reveal that all youth are so engaged. In fact, such practices tend to be highly skewed towards particular economic levels (at which school literacy attainment tends to be high anyway). Hollywood loves to feature teen whiz kids who sneak into the Pentagon computers and access the missile launch codes, or straighten out the credit crisis for our banks. The image is cute, but not very accurate.

The reason that a lot of kids can use literacy in these new ways is most likely because they are appropriating the literacy taught them at school for their own purposes (as has been done by literacy users since scribes began incising characters on clay tablets). A nationwide study of literacy practices among teens and young adults would be informative, and I suspect they would show that the kids who were doing well with traditional literacy were the ones most likely to explore new literacies.

Ultimately, these ideas founder on the premise that we should teach popular culture and the literacy practices of youth in school. If you want to kill youth culture, then try to appropriate it. Instead of romanticizing the use of these non-school literacies, we need to recognize their limitations. As Don Leu and his colleagues at the University of Connecticut have been showing, teens may be using the Internet, but they are not sophisticated users by any means. School needs to stay to the business of teaching kids to read demanding and difficult text and to be thoughtful and critical in those readings. My observations tell me that the reading of youth culture tends to be relatively simple, derivative of school practices, and not very deep or critical. Sometimes it is best to tend to your own knitting, and I suspect that is the case here. We need a lot more attention on school literacy all the way up through Grade 12; let’s trust that kids will figure out Hip Hop and Xbox for themselves.

Timothy Shanahan

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About Me

Timothy Shanahan is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of urban education at the University of Illinois at Chicago where he was Founding Director of the Center for Literacy and chair of the Department of Curriculum and Instruction. He is also visiting research professor at Queens University, Belfast, Northern Ireland. He is principal investigator of the National Title I Study of Implementation and Outcomes: Early Childhood Language Development. Professor Shanahan was director of reading for the Chicago Public Schools. His research emphasizes reading-writing relationships, reading assessment, and improving reading achievement. He is past president of the International Reading Association. In 2006, he received a presidential appointment to serve on the Advisory Board of the National Institute for Literacy. He was inducted to the Reading Hall of Fame in 2007. He is a former first-grade teacher.